How do community products such as Zhihu and Xiaohongshu conduct user operations?

In my mind, I habitually compare product communities to dance floors for users.

The dance floor originally means a place for ballroom dancing, which is usually in the center of the dance hall, slightly lower than the rest area. Here, it is appropriate to compare it to a community of private users of an enterprise.

I don’t know if it makes you feel its unique artistic conception at this moment.

1. What is a community?

The original community refers to online communication spaces including BBS/forums, discussion groups, chat rooms, blogs, etc. Online communities with the same theme often bring together a large number of users with common interests.

For example, in the impressions of many people born in the 1980s, there are Mop, Tianya Community, Renren, Sina Forum... In the minds of people born in the 1990s, the most familiar ones should be QQ Community, Baidu Tieba, and Douban. In the eyes of people born in the 2000s, QQ Kandian, Douyin, and Kuaishou are also mainstream video content communities.

In terms of the products themselves, we have also found that in recent years more and more products have begun to build their own exclusive communities, and some products are named "Discovery Page".

Looking back over the past 10 years, topics of different themes initially dominated the development of UGC communities, and now have led to the construction of product private domain traffic pools - product communities.

It is not difficult to find that with the development of mobile Internet, today's communities not only retain the original communication function of the community, but also release many new functions, mainly focusing on marketing, social interaction, and content creation.

Have you ever found or thought about similar problems?

In fact, as I mentioned in my previous article, "The demographic dividend of mobile Internet has reached its ceiling, and various platforms are increasingly focusing on user value and sustainable commercial monetization capabilities."

There is a prerequisite for obtaining user value, that is, users must have relevant needs. User needs and user value are symbiotically related.

In recent times, discovering user needs and turning products into platforms has become an iterative approach that most C-end products need to be brave enough to try.

Therefore, from the perspective of product planning, product managers may need to change their thinking when making products.

What are the changes?

Usually when we download an APP, we want to use its core functions to meet our basic needs, such as shopping, accounting, learning, etc. Meeting basic needs is the first level of thinking of a product manager when making a product.

The second level of thinking is to discover more needs and use content forms such as practical information, short videos, and topic interactions to meet users' basic needs for "content consumption." In addition to meeting basic content consumption needs, the main function is to enable users to gain a greater sense of belonging and retain users as much as possible. This is the mainstream thinking in building communities at present.

The third level of thinking is that, on the premise of meeting the first two basic needs, the product builds a private traffic center for the product by fully exploring potential needs and even creating new needs, ultimately maximizing user value.

1. The significance of product community

What is it?

From the above content, we can see that the attributes and functions of the product basically meet the core needs of users. The role of the community is to provide users with interesting and fun activities, output valuable content, and convey more brand information in addition to meeting the core needs...

Obviously, the purpose of doing this is to keep users in the company's private domain as much as possible, extend the user life cycle, meet more potential needs of users, make users feel that their expectations are exceeded, and maximize the economic benefits of the product. From the perspective of building a closed-loop product operation ecosystem, the user community is an important component of building an operational moat.

In short, product communities need to provide users with unexpected experiences that exceed their expectations, firmly grasp users' multi-level needs, and enhance user loyalty; over the next long period of time, the trend of mobile Internet products' intervention in users will gradually increase from incremental to stock. From the perspective of corporate revenue generation, the operator's goal through operating a good community is to create more user value for the company.

2. Current Status of Product Community Development

Many years ago, Tencent QQ had an open forum - QQ Forum, which gradually disappeared from people's sight with the rise of Zhihu and WeChat.

In 2015, one of the businesses of my friend's company was to sell health products and sex toys on behalf of others. At that time, they had their own shopping mall and there was an entrance to the QQ forum on the homepage of the mall. In fact, for users, this was a discovery page. When you enter the forum, you will see many "featured" topics, each of which is created and managed by loyal users. However, the role of the forum in the mall is only to direct public opinion in a positive direction and create a UGC section with high activity and lively atmosphere.

Another example:

After many years, when we open the new Youdao Dictionary on our mobile phones, we are surprised to find:

"Wow, how did Youdao Dictionary become like this?"

“The discovery page is filled with columns, articles, topics, and communities. I can’t believe it’s the original translation tool.”

I remember my colleague jokingly said, “Yes, many apps are like this now. If you give all these products to Zhang Xiaolong, he will probably go crazy!”

It is undeniable that with the transformation and upgrading of the products themselves, the iteration of functions, and more importantly, the increasing cost of traffic acquisition for Internet products, the product forms of many applications are forced to change accordingly.

The product community is the product of product platformization, such as the following communities that carry different functions.

1. Kung Fu Finance-National Financial Quotient Enhancer

The core business of Kung Fu Finance is to gather many big names in the financial circle to provide professional financial services, including financial services. What kind of function settings are there on his discovery page?

From the picture below, we can see that in addition to some professional financial courses, the community has a highly interactive section called "Stocks and Money", which is actually an interactive section for guessing the rise and fall of stocks. (This has been analyzed in detail in the previous article "Can't retain users? Try these 9 methods!!") This is also a common way of interaction for many financial, fund and stock market products.

2. Ant Fortune - for a freer life

The Ant Fortune community consists of three parts: hot discussion area, celebrity follow-up area, and wealth column.

Popular discussion area: Generally, KOLs from various vertical industries are responsible for the discussion of each section. For example, the index fund discussion is all about index funds.

Pay attention to the big names: it gathers big names in the vertical fields of funds, stocks, and finance. By following them, you can read their useful articles, give rewards, and ask questions.

Wealth Column: It is more like an information flow, but the articles are all centered around finance.

If we use it, we will find that it has a lot of community content, even a bit excessive. Will this situation make users feel depressed and unable to find the key points? In fact, this type of layout makes the reading experience very unpleasant for current users' reading habits.

But what is the motivation behind this overflowing "excess" content? I'm afraid it's telling users, "There are many big names in our community who share a lot of professional financial knowledge, you should come and see it."

On its "Discovery Page", we will find that in addition to carrying the core functions of the product, there are also columns such as pension, fixed investment calculator, wealth account, wealth column and wealth SHOW.

It can be seen that the discovery page is extremely rich, but it is not as "excessive" as the "community page".

3. LuXsuo - Investment and Financial Management Platform

As can be seen from the picture below, in addition to a search entrance at the top, the discovery page consists of three parts: Lu Community, Real-time Information, and Lu Video.

The forms of expression include questions and answers, topic discussions, and anchor rankings. As an investment and financial management platform, LuXuo, in addition to providing its own financial management services, can be said to have greatly enriched users' additional demands for practical information, hot news, and short videos.

To learn about investment and stock trading, we can go to professional institutions or apps; to read hot news, we can go to Sina Finance, Phoenix Finance, and NetEase Finance; to watch short videos, we can also use Douyin. But it tells you that what you want to see is available at Lufax.

Although the discovery page provides a wealth of content related to its own business, it is not all-encompassing. This balance is struck very accurately. At present, there are few products in the financial field that can achieve this level.

4. Zhihu - Discover a bigger world

To be precise, Zhihu is more like a forum: users can discuss a topic of interest and follow people with similar interests. For conceptual explanations, online encyclopedias cover almost all your questions; but the integration of divergent thinking is a major feature of Zhihu.

I believe many people have known about or used Zhihu. The biggest features of Zhihu are vertical topics, high degree of specialization, and high appearance. In 2017 and 2018, it was even reported that Toutiao paid high salaries to poach big Vs in Zhihu's vertical fields to develop Toutiao's Wukong Q&A section. Can we infer that Zhihu's Q&A community is of high quality and professional?

For such a community Q&A product, it also has its own "discovery page". From the picture below, we can see that the Q&A format of the discovery page embedded on the homepage is no different from that of the homepage. Why not just put it on the homepage?

If we look carefully, we will find that the questions and answers on the discovery page have different characteristics. They are often published recently, and the number of likes and comments is not very obvious; while the questions and answers on the homepage have a large number of likes and comments, and have been published for some time, which can be understood as topics that people are more concerned about.

So can we understand that the Q&A on the discovery page is a hot topic incubation community? If we follow the algorithm for appearing on the homepage, the topics on the discovery page may not comply with the rules.

However, the mobile version of Zhihu does not have a discovery page, only a discovery page for friends. In fact, the purpose is to allow users to follow more big Vs, thereby improving the retention and interaction of new users.

5. Xiaohongshu – Marking my life

This product looks colorful and records diverse life. What special functions will its discovery page have? In fact, the discovery page is directly embedded in the homepage. It can be seen that its function also carries the core function of the product, that is, to record the colorful life like a kaleidoscope for users through algorithm rules.

From the previous article on user psychological needs analysis "16666 words original, disassemble the "user needs model", explore the underlying logic of operations, and find the secret to make operations easier! ” mentioned that the more people’s needs are met at the same time, the more dependent they are on the product; another point is that the community atmosphere of Xiaohongshu also determines its diversity in marketing.

It is not difficult to find that from the product Xiaohongshu, the entire product meets the users' needs in all aspects of "clothing, housing, food, drink, play and entertainment". Currently, Xiaohongshu covers a full range of content such as celebrities, film and television, reading, food, home, games, etc.; even if it only provides a recording platform for sharing good things, and with the iteration of products and pressures such as profitability, more user needs are magnified as much as possible, for example: the categories of shared products are enriched, shopping is available, and there are more ways to interact with creators.

6. QQ

An Internet-based instant messaging (IM) software, which is also a national-level social software, currently has more than 800 million monthly active users.

This national-level social product has a discovery page called "Highlights". When you enter the page, you can see many familiar content-based categories at the top: videos, pictures, novels, etc.; and at a floating entrance, you can enter short videos, which are a bit like the short videos on Tik Tok, further enriching QQ's content system.

Since the rise of WeChat, QQ's growth rate has slowed down significantly, even though the number of registered users is still growing. In addition, Toutiao has ambitious social networking plans. Guiding users to discover more interesting content through "Highlights" will directly help increase user usage time and stickiness.

Conclusion

In summary, we have spent a lot of time sharing products in different fields, from financial investment, life and entertainment, vertical communities to workplace social networking. It is not difficult to find that most product communities are basically centered around the core business of the product itself. The general methods are as follows:

① Retain users by providing richer content and provide some professional experts to enrich users' knowledge to improve stickiness (mainly UGC, basically disseminating useful information or information in the form of text, pictures, audio and video);

② Create an opportunity for users to bring in a certain amount of external traffic by sharing content;

③ Provide an entry point for interaction with users to meet their play needs, or as a basic function to supplement the core functions;

④ Take advantage of users’ habit of scrolling through “information flow” and embed products to improve product/service conversion rates.

On the other hand, product communities have basically existed in the form of content or topics so far, because content is the most widely compatible and basic service, and "content consumption" is also a necessity for users. This also explains why so many product communities encourage and guide the development of UGC (user-generated content).

From a product perspective, the role and function of the community are similar, but I think the community needs to carry more functions such as retaining product users and discovering new user needs for better monetization.

We can see that with the development of mobile Internet products, the community has basically evolved from simply providing a page for user discussion to one that needs to carry the product towards platform-based functions, and the entire product ecosystem has become increasingly complete.

However, at present, product communities seem to still be stuck in the second-level thinking (i.e. meeting more user needs), and community products that embody the third-level thinking (discovering or even creating other user needs to maximize user value) are rare.

So is there such a product community at present?

Yes, just like the UGC music reviews of Alipay Ant Forest and NetEase Cloud Music.

Alipay and NetEase Cloud not only meet the core needs of users, but also created two communities, Ant Forest and NetEase Cloud UGC Music Reviews, which are unforgettable to users and have become the unique advantages of the products. Now Ant Forest and NetEase Cloud Music Reviews are gradually becoming important cultural symbols of the product community.

Author: Shengjie

Source: Operational Evolution History (ilove-yunying)